Breaking The Tower

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This little browser-based strategy is painfully slow – so slow you can go to the post office, extricate yourself from having to talk to the old woman from next door, then make a cup of tea and still only have generated just enough resource to continue – yet it’s somehow utterly engrossing. As the title suggests, you have to break the tower at the far end of the island. You can only do this by placing buildings on the island, and eventually masons at the foot of the tower. That’s all the influence you have on the lives of the peons and warriors who populate the island, and who battle with the monsters that emanate from the tower. No, really, it’s got something. Try it. (And don’t accidentally click away from a twenty-minute game, as I just did. NoooOOOo.)

There is no install version. it’s an online Java game. You just go to the webpage and click in the game window to start up. Protip: If you build a farm and windmill and forget about the game for four hours, you’re set for life in food.

1hr, and of course, I wasn’t watching.
Now playing the after-game – what is the highest sustainable population of the island? I don’t think the little mens need food once created, so in theory I could end up with an island of just apartment blocks? Destroying woodcutters & stonecutters once I have enough resources, to make space.
Which will give out first, my patience or my laptop fan (it’s struggling at 220 peons).

Here is my happy village of 500.link to bay01.imagebay.com
It has a garrison of 30 soldiers to keep the villagers at bay and to rid the town of those troublemakers with the silly idea that life has no meaning now that the tower is gone

I forgot about my island and left it alone for four hours. I came back to find nearly everywhere that wasn’t building had overgrown with forest, I had 0 wood and all my peons were stranded away from the huts. It took some creative building and selling before I could start to clear the area…

That was ace. A couple of farms and mills to get to 50 villagers and 10 warriors, a row of lumber mills to clear a path to the tower, and then a guard post and 5 mason huts next to the tower to bring it down. Victory in 53 minutes – most of which I spent playing Tomb Raider Anniversary. What a great little distraction.

Having won, and subsequently utterly decimated the ecology of the island, I felt guilty and thus immediately began a massive reforrestation project. I eventually demolished everything except about 20 or 30 planters. Once you have the population, you don’t need the houses anymore, so even they went. All 100 of my people and my 30 strong military apparently live in trees now.

This is how I discovered that the game is, in fact, an elaborate telling of the origin story of elves.

The guardtowers aren’t as effective as they should be. During the endgame I had at least 6-7 soldiers just wandering around aimlessly on the shore instead of defending my masons surrounding the tower, despite the fact that I had built four guardtowers in that area to keep them focused.

That was fun. I took an hour and 30 minutes to take down the tower, mainly as I avoided touching it until the rest of the stone was gone. Got rid of all the existing forests but replanted them in three locations. Always kept an army half as big as my villager population. Had 140 villagers when the tower was finally gone.

I didn’t figure out until near the end that the most important thing for production was population and location, not number of buildings. Same goes for farms and planters, they’ll place lots of crops and saplings if there’s plenty of space. Most of my planters and farms instead only had about 30 – 50% of their total growing area because I thought I needed more of them.

I actually spent much of my time watching the screen kind of distractedly, rather than just doing something else entirely. I always find it oddly comforting and intriguing to see an ‘ecosystem’ I built run its course, which probably explains why I’ve spent solid weeks doing little other than watching little ASCII happy-faces with beards trundle along corridors.